Back in February, a group of volunteer tutors from 826 Seattle walked into John Marshall Alternative School and asked students to write about change. After six weeks of intensive one-on-one tutoring, they left with a book’s worth. And it was with much celebration that students, tutors, friends and family filled Marshall’s auditorium Tuesday night to launch "Burning the Past," the latest collection of essays from this incredible collaboration.

Festivities were brief but appropriate. 826 Seattle Director Teri Hein and Marshall teacher Audra Gallegos praised the work of the organization’s volunteer tutors who worked three times a week with student writers and who, in total, have provided free writing assistance to over 2,400 students in Seattle this year alone. Stranger writer Charles Mudede, who wrote the introduction to “Burning,” was also on hand and spoke of the joy and permanence of being published.

“Burning” is not the first collaboration between 826 and Marshall, who joined students at the American Indian Middle College in 2006 to create “It’s Not Always Happily Ever After: Lessons in Family Life.” But "Burning" is distinctly Marshall. Because who better to write about change than these students? For starters, the School District has dangled the "We're closing your school/We're not closing your school" carrot in front of their noses for years. The latest verdict is that the Marshall will officially close at the end of the 2007-08 school year. And then there’s the “life” stuff.

Their stories are tough. Drug abuse, arrests, suspension, and delinquent parents. But don’t do them the disservice of chocking it all up to teenage angst (yes, they are teenagers), because these kids can write. And yes, they are kids, which makes the fact that they’re writing these stories all the more infuriating and fantastic.

Fantastic because they are writing in the face of people who are shouting that their stories don’t matter. An anonymous school administrator referred to Marshall in a Seattle Times article back in March as the school that takes "the kids no one else wants." As a voluntary alternative school with one of the district’s only re-entry programs for previously expelled and incarcerated students and an in-house childcare program for teen mothers, it has become a target for standardized testing/NCLB hounds, who seem to have no problem leaving it behind. The school district says Marshall’s attendance and curriculum are too lax; students say they are more committed to their education at Marshall than ever before. We say, hallelujah for people like Gallegos and those 826 volunteers who haven't forgotten that just because it's not on the WASL doesn't mean it's not important.

Gallegos closed her remarks last night with the words of Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hanh: "Impermanence is an instrument for our liberation." If so, our fellow writers at Marshall, here's to having the last laugh.

* For now, you can purchase a copy of "Burning the Past" via:
826 Seattle
814 Greenwood Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98103
206.725.2625